[QUOTE]Originally posted by woj1@cyberonic. [B]Germany urges U.S. missile defense talks By DAVID RISING, BERLIN - The German foreign minister suggested Saturday that the U.S. plan to build a missile defense system in Europe has merits, but said an open discussion was needed to address concerns from all sides.

In an opinion piece for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung to be printed Sunday ahead of his trip to Washington, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged all sides to take a step back from the escalating rhetoric.

"We need calm and seriousness, not agitation. We must ask the right questions and think of the possible consequences," he wrote in the piece, provided in advance to The Associated Press.

"The United States maintains a need to protect itself from Iranian long-range rockets. That is legitimate

[QUOTE]Originally posted by woj1@cyberonic. [B]PiS (Kresydent Kczynski and premier Kaczynski) party program, Poland heard today without good touching. It was old Gomulka speech only more tragic and with changing direction from East to West, .and also cooperation with Israel

by Charley Reese A little more than half of the U.S. population lives in 75 metropolitan areas. Russia has 4,399 nuclear warheads deployed. Except for 624 to be carried by bombers, they are all land-based and submarine missiles.

Furthermore, this past week Russia test-fired a land-based missile, the RSM54, and a submarine-launched missile. Both were intercontinental. Both hit their targets dead-on. The sub launch was, by the way, the sixth such test-firing conducted this year.

In the meantime, Iran has no nuclear weapons and no intercontinental ballistic missiles or long-range bombers. North Korea might have two or three nuclear missiles. Yet the administration, and most of America's news media, seems obsessed with Iran, no doubt because Israel is obsessed with Iran. A story by the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee played a lobbying role in deleting a provision in the defense bill that would have required the president to get Congress' OK before launching a war against Iran.

So what's my point? First, when assessing threats, all but fools look at capability, not intentions or rhetoric. Russia has the capability of wiping us out. Iran would be hard-pressed to sink one destroyer. Therefore, it would behoove us to put good relations with Russia very high on a diplomatic agenda. Yet, on the contrary, the Bush administration goes out of its way to insult Russia and to interfere in what Russia sees as its internal affairs.

Its almost a chicken or the egg querry.

Is it Israel or the US that is demonstarting that they are untouchable.

Meanwhile Putin has visited the Middle East at will and done he business. In comparison Bush visited Iraq and his 'business' is all over his face.

Originally posted by woj1@cyberonic. As it approaches EU 50th birthday this week poll which shows that 44 per cent of citizens think life has got worse since their country joined the club. -

There is no way out. Another 5 years and there may be a majority, but it might take another war first. Europeans should know that some how all the big changes only come through war.The European Commission rules not the respective govts.

Originally posted by Bader []And Poland will disappear into the global system like planet into a blckhole in space.

The world economies cant expand beyond 'global', that's the limit and the debt bubble will catch it up and swallow it. Same is happeing in the US. Nicely timed for the baby-boomer generation so they die off earlier. B]

You can not say that my country Poland is going to black holes. Bad leaders who are going together with wars passes how terrible nightmare .

Russian President Vladimir Putin schussed down a trail at the new Psekhako Ridge ski area in the Caucasus Mountains last month to promote the region's bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics. In case photographers missed the shot, a snowmobile towed him back up the hill for another run.

State-controlled OAO Gazprom is investing $375 million in Psekhako Ridge, above the Black Sea city of Sochi. One peak away, billionaire Vladimir Potanin is plowing $262 million into another resort. Aluminum mogul Oleg Deripaska plans to spend $1.5 billion on the international airport and Olympic village in Sochi.

While the proposed venues are 850 miles south of Moscow, they are a microcosm of development in Russia today. In a capitalist version of the 10-year plan, the Kremlin picks projects and then marshals public and private investment. The market takes a back seat, retarding growth, says Rory MacFarquhar, a Moscow-based economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

``This is being decided from top down,'' he says. ``Investment is being channeled into priorities identified by the leadership, which may or may not be the optimal ones for the country.''

With Russia's 1998 debt default a fading memory, the nation has embarked on a program of investments not seen since the Brezhnev-era of the late 1970s. Record oil and gas prices have swelled Russia's reserves to $317.3 billion, surpassed only by Japan and China. To cushion any drop in prices, the government maintains a ``stabilization fund,'' now at $103.6 billion.

Nationwide, about $450 billion of public and private investments are planned over the next 15 years, according to figures released by Economy Minister German Gref. Creating a modern road system will cost an additional $323 billion by 2025, says Sergei Ivanov, first deputy prime minister and a leading candidate to succeed Putin, who steps down next year.

`Culture of Nyet'

Defenders of the top-down model say that only the locomotive of a Kremlin-led project, endorsed by the president, is enough to break through Russia's bureaucratic ``culture of nyet.''

Russia's newly restored pride is driving the effort to beat South Korea and Austria for the Winter Olympics, much the way China is using the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing to announce its arrival as a world power. The International Olympic Committee will select the winner July 4 in Guatemala City.

Against the backdrop of Black Sea beaches and snow-covered peaks, Russia's bid faces the same hurdles as projects in other parts of the country: property rights that are among the weakest in the world, and a Soviet-era power grid that can leave developers without electricity.

Potanin, Deripaska

In Sochi and the mountain village of Krasnaya Polana, these forces are playing out in an 8-year, $12 billion plan to create a world-class winter resort in a region that now has a single line of slow-moving chairlifts to carry skiers up one peak.

Potanin, owner of OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel, is building the Rose Khutor ski area, with three gondolas, 20 trails and five restaurants. Deripaska, chairman of OAO Russian Aluminium, in November outbid fellow billionaire Viktor Vekselberg and bought the half-completed Sochi international airport for $206 million.

``This is not a presidential project,'' says Potanin, who regularly skis in Courchevel in the French Alps. ``It will go on under the next president, the next president and the next president.''

Russia's so-called oligarchs, who wield both political and economic power, know the price for crossing the Kremlin can be as steep as the new double black diamond runs that are being opened on the 2,000-meter (6,600-foot) peaks outside Sochi.

In 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, co-owner of OAO Yukos Oil Co., topped the Forbes list of Russian billionaires. Today, he's in a Russian prison serving eight years for fraud and tax evasion. His lawyers say the sentence is punishment for challenging Putin.

Lifts Shut

Alpika Service, Krasnaya Polana's only working ski area, may be crushed by Russia's Olympic ambitions.

The company shut down its chairlift for two days on Jan. 22, after government inspectors sealed a warehouse containing spare parts, says President Pyotr Fedin. Skiers interviewed in January said police stopped buses to check passenger documents.

Fedin says local officials are trying to push him off the mountain after 15 years of a 50-year lease.

They ``want to bankrupt and close Alpika Service,'' Fedin says. ``Since Jan. 19, we have had more than 30 visits by different kinds of inspectors -- medical inspections, fire department inspections, tax inspections, ecology, tourism.''

Vladimir Prigoda, a spokesman for the Krasnodar regional government, on March 16 declined to comment. In January, when the inspections began, Krasnodar officials said they were trying to improve safety at the ski area.

Property Rights

The Alpika Service crackdown isn't the first time government inspectors have raised regulatory issues with a private investor.

Last October, environmental inspectors threatened to cancel permits for a Royal Dutch Shell Plc project on Sakhalin Island in Russia's far east. Two months later, Shell and its Japanese partners agreed to cede control of the project to Moscow-based Gazprom, the world's largest gas producer.

Partly because of the Sakhalin takeover, Russia was ranked 63rd of 70 countries in a survey of property rights released March 6 by the Washington-based Property Rights Alliance. The study placed Russia between Pakistan and Nigeria.

Another challenge to the Olympic bid is energy.

Just before a team of IOC inspectors visited last month, the power went out in Sochi.

Anatoly Chubais, chairman of national power monopoly OAO Unified Energy System, says Russia needs to invest $30 billion of public and private money in the electricity grid every year through 2010. On Feb. 17, UES agreed to invest $3.2 billion for power plants and distribution lines for the Sochi region.

Energy Crisis

``All this Soviet-era energy infrastructure has been allowed to amortize for a decade and a half, and now we are paying the price for that,'' MacFarquhar says. ``It is very difficult for new green-field companies to be attached to the grid, to receive power, to receive gas.''

A total of $1.1 billion is going into four ski resorts around Krasnaya Polana, a 40-minute drive from Sochi's airport.

With seven gondolas planned for the area, Krasnaya Polana represents the largest concentration of ski industry investment in the world today, says Paul Mathews, president of Ecosign Mountain Resorts Planners Ltd., a Whistler, Canada-based company that is designing Rosa Khutor.

Gref says the goal is to build the region into a year-round attraction, with skating rinks and ski slopes to compete with the Alps, and spa hotels to rival Turkey's beach resorts.

Sochi's subtropical resorts, once a haven for the Soviet elite, have been neglected since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. When communism ended so did travel restrictions and Russians flocked to Egypt, Turkey and Thailand instead.

New Flights

To bring tourists to Russia's southernmost corner, flights from Frankfurt, Dubai and Istanbul began arriving in Sochi this winter. The new terminal at Sochi International Airport is scheduled to open next year, part of a plan triple the number of incoming passengers to 3.4 million by 2014.

Investment is creating a boomtown in Krasnaya Polana. On back streets, where roosters crow and wood smoke hangs in the air, battered houses with plastic sheets tacked over the windows stand next to blonde-wood ski chalets whose driveways are filled with sport-utility vehicles bearing Moscow license plates.

``Real estate prices are doubling every year,'' says Tom Rawlins, a 36-year-old British real estate developer who is building almost 600 apartments and cottages and a Tudor-style brew pub. ``The people here now are the pioneers.''

International Visitors

Some are skeptical.

``The only Russians who will come here to ski are the ones who can't get visas for Europe,'' Yulia Filipova, 25, a marketing consultant from Moscow, says after riding Alpika's battered double chairlift, which can only carry 1,000 skiers a day.

The region's three new resorts are scheduled to be open by 2010, with 125 miles of trails and lifts for 33,500 skiers a day.

Investors in the Caucasus may be working against the clock to create a resort that can compete with the best of Europe. Russia and the European Union have set a goal of achieving visa- free travel by 2011.

Travel to Europe is already increasing. In January, Russians spent 89,300 nights in Switzerland, up 32 percent from the same month last year, the Swiss government reported March 12.

Still, the money keeps flowing to Sochi. Mathews, who has designed 225 ski areas around the world, says the boom is similar to one that corporations such as Sony Corp., Yamaha Corp. and East Japan Railway Co. financed in Japan during the 1980s.

``The difference is that now it's Russian oligarchs,'' he says. ``They all want the president to ski their area.''

Originally posted by woj1@cyberonic. Russian President Vladimir Putin schussed down a trail at the new Psekhako Ridge ski area in the Caucasus Mountains last month to promote the region's bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics. In case photographers missed the shot, a snowmobile towed him back up the hill for another run.

State-controlled OAO Gazprom is investing $375 million in Psekhako Ridge, above the Black Sea city of Sochi. One peak away, billionaire Vladimir Potanin is plowing $262 million into another resort. Aluminum mogul Oleg Deripaska plans to spend $1.5 billion on the international airport and Olympic village in Sochi.

While the proposed venues are 850 miles south of Moscow, they are a microcosm of development in Russia today. In a capitalist version of the 10-year plan, the Kremlin picks projects and then marshals public and private investment. The market takes a back seat, retarding growth, says Rory MacFarquhar, a Moscow-based economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

``This is being decided from top down,'' he says. ``Investment is being channeled into priorities identified by the leadership, which may or may not be the optimal ones for the country.''

With Russia's 1998 debt default a fading memory, the nation has embarked on a program of investments not seen since the Brezhnev-era of the late 1970s. Record oil and gas prices have swelled Russia's reserves to $317.3 billion, surpassed only by Japan and China. To cushion any drop in prices, the government maintains a ``stabilization fund,'' now at $103.6 billion.

Nationwide, about $450 billion of public and private investments are planned over the next 15 years, according to figures released by Economy Minister German Gref. Creating a modern road system will cost an additional $323 billion by 2025, says Sergei Ivanov, first deputy prime minister and a leading candidate to succeed Putin, who steps down next year.

`Culture of Nyet'

Defenders of the top-down model say that only the locomotive of a Kremlin-led project, endorsed by the president, is enough to break through Russia's bureaucratic ``culture of nyet.''

Russia's newly restored pride is driving the effort to beat South Korea and Austria for the Winter Olympics, much the way China is using the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing to announce its arrival as a world power. The International Olympic Committee will select the winner July 4 in Guatemala City.

Against the backdrop of Black Sea beaches and snow-covered peaks, Russia's bid faces the same hurdles as projects in other parts of the country: property rights that are among the weakest in the world, and a Soviet-era power grid that can leave developers without electricity.

Potanin, Deripaska

In Sochi and the mountain village of Krasnaya Polana, these forces are playing out in an 8-year, $12 billion plan to create a world-class winter resort in a region that now has a single line of slow-moving chairlifts to carry skiers up one peak.

Potanin, owner of OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel, is building the Rose Khutor ski area, with three gondolas, 20 trails and five restaurants. Deripaska, chairman of OAO Russian Aluminium, in November outbid fellow billionaire Viktor Vekselberg and bought the half-completed Sochi international airport for $206 million.

``This is not a presidential project,'' says Potanin, who regularly skis in Courchevel in the French Alps. ``It will go on under the next president, the next president and the next president.''

Russia's so-called oligarchs, who wield both political and economic power, know the price for crossing the Kremlin can be as steep as the new double black diamond runs that are being opened on the 2,000-meter (6,600-foot) peaks outside Sochi.

In 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, co-owner of OAO Yukos Oil Co., topped the Forbes list of Russian billionaires. Today, he's in a Russian prison serving eight years for fraud and tax evasion. His lawyers say the sentence is punishment for challenging Putin.

Lifts Shut

Alpika Service, Krasnaya Polana's only working ski area, may be crushed by Russia's Olympic ambitions.

The company shut down its chairlift for two days on Jan. 22, after government inspectors sealed a warehouse containing spare parts, says President Pyotr Fedin. Skiers interviewed in January said police stopped buses to check passenger documents.

Fedin says local officials are trying to push him off the mountain after 15 years of a 50-year lease.

They ``want to bankrupt and close Alpika Service,'' Fedin says. ``Since Jan. 19, we have had more than 30 visits by different kinds of inspectors -- medical inspections, fire department inspections, tax inspections, ecology, tourism.''

Vladimir Prigoda, a spokesman for the Krasnodar regional government, on March 16 declined to comment. In January, when the inspections began, Krasnodar officials said they were trying to improve safety at the ski area.

Property Rights

The Alpika Service crackdown isn't the first time government inspectors have raised regulatory issues with a private investor.

Last October, environmental inspectors threatened to cancel permits for a Royal Dutch Shell Plc project on Sakhalin Island in Russia's far east. Two months later, Shell and its Japanese partners agreed to cede control of the project to Moscow-based Gazprom, the world's largest gas producer.

Partly because of the Sakhalin takeover, Russia was ranked 63rd of 70 countries in a survey of property rights released March 6 by the Washington-based Property Rights Alliance. The study placed Russia between Pakistan and Nigeria.

Another challenge to the Olympic bid is energy.

Just before a team of IOC inspectors visited last month, the power went out in Sochi.

Anatoly Chubais, chairman of national power monopoly OAO Unified Energy System, says Russia needs to invest $30 billion of public and private money in the electricity grid every year through 2010. On Feb. 17, UES agreed to invest $3.2 billion for power plants and distribution lines for the Sochi region.

Energy Crisis

``All this Soviet-era energy infrastructure has been allowed to amortize for a decade and a half, and now we are paying the price for that,'' MacFarquhar says. ``It is very difficult for new green-field companies to be attached to the grid, to receive power, to receive gas.''

A total of $1.1 billion is going into four ski resorts around Krasnaya Polana, a 40-minute drive from Sochi's airport.

With seven gondolas planned for the area, Krasnaya Polana represents the largest concentration of ski industry investment in the world today, says Paul Mathews, president of Ecosign Mountain Resorts Planners Ltd., a Whistler, Canada-based company that is designing Rosa Khutor.

Gref says the goal is to build the region into a year-round attraction, with skating rinks and ski slopes to compete with the Alps, and spa hotels to rival Turkey's beach resorts.

Sochi's subtropical resorts, once a haven for the Soviet elite, have been neglected since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. When communism ended so did travel restrictions and Russians flocked to Egypt, Turkey and Thailand instead.

New Flights

To bring tourists to Russia's southernmost corner, flights from Frankfurt, Dubai and Istanbul began arriving in Sochi this winter. The new terminal at Sochi International Airport is scheduled to open next year, part of a plan triple the number of incoming passengers to 3.4 million by 2014.

Investment is creating a boomtown in Krasnaya Polana. On back streets, where roosters crow and wood smoke hangs in the air, battered houses with plastic sheets tacked over the windows stand next to blonde-wood ski chalets whose driveways are filled with sport-utility vehicles bearing Moscow license plates.

``Real estate prices are doubling every year,'' says Tom Rawlins, a 36-year-old British real estate developer who is building almost 600 apartments and cottages and a Tudor-style brew pub. ``The people here now are the pioneers.''

International Visitors

Some are skeptical.

``The only Russians who will come here to ski are the ones who can't get visas for Europe,'' Yulia Filipova, 25, a marketing consultant from Moscow, says after riding Alpika's battered double chairlift, which can only carry 1,000 skiers a day.

The region's three new resorts are scheduled to be open by 2010, with 125 miles of trails and lifts for 33,500 skiers a day.

Investors in the Caucasus may be working against the clock to create a resort that can compete with the best of Europe. Russia and the European Union have set a goal of achieving visa- free travel by 2011.

Travel to Europe is already increasing. In January, Russians spent 89,300 nights in Switzerland, up 32 percent from the same month last year, the Swiss government reported March 12.

Still, the money keeps flowing to Sochi. Mathews, who has designed 225 ski areas around the world, says the boom is similar to one that corporations such as Sony Corp., Yamaha Corp. and East Japan Railway Co. financed in Japan during the 1980s.

``The difference is that now it's Russian oligarchs,'' he says. ``They all want the president to ski their area.''

Who makes the big decisions in Goldman Sachs? The janitor or the Chief Executive?

A normal part of the commercial world is create a product and make a market for it- its called promoting a new product. If the market ( whim of consumers) is theorigin of progress then we would be way back at a seventies level.

Originally posted by Bader B]The 'top down' comment is an insult to ones intelligence.

Who makes the big decisions in Goldman Sachs? The janitor or the Chief Executive?

A normal part of the commercial world is create a product and make a market for it- its called promoting a new product. If the market ( whim of consumers) is theorigin of progress then we would be way back at a seventies level. B]

Oh sorry. This why is better read article before make the copy. I forgot with whom I deal with ( Bloomberg) , and some idea of Winter Olympic in Sochi sound great to me. I will never commit such a crime again. In Poland is big storm. Ex Sejm Leader accused ex Polish president

The Russian bear is awake. But this is not a Russia restored to past greatness. It is caught in a failed transition. So long as this continues, Russia will disturb its neighbours and disappoint its citizens. Is there a chance of something better? Yes, but it is a small one.

Vladimir Putin expressed the attitudes of the new Russia, at once assertive and aggrieved, at the 43rd Munich conference on security policy this month.

The U.S. Navy, after nearly six years of warnings from Pentagon testers, still lacks a plan for defending aircraft carriers against a supersonic Russian-built missile, according to current and former officials and Defense Department documents.

The missile, known in the West as the ``Sizzler,'' has been deployed by China and may be purchased by Iran. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England has given the Navy until April 29 to explain how it will counter the missile, according to a Pentagon budget document.

The Defense Department's weapons-testing office judges the threat so serious that its director, Charles McQueary, warned the Pentagon's chief weapons-buyer in a memo that he would move to stall production of multibillion-dollar ship and missile programs until the issue was addressed.

``This is a carrier-destroying weapon,'' said Orville Hanson, who evaluated weapons systems for 38 years with the Navy. ``That's its purpose.''

``Take out the carriers'' and China ``can walk into Taiwan,'' he said. China bought the missiles in 2002 along with eight diesel submarines designed to fire it, according to Office of Naval Intelligence spokesman Robert Althage.

A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia also offered the missile to Iran, although there's no evidence a sale has gone through. In Iranian hands, the Sizzler could challenge the ability of the U.S. Navy to keep open the Strait of Hormuz, through which an estimated 25 percent of the world's oil traffic flows.

Fast and Low-Flying

``This is a very low-flying, fast missile,'' said retired Rear Admiral Eric McVadon, a former U.S. naval attache in Beijing. ``It won't be visible until it's quite close. By the time you detect it to the time it hits you is very short. You'd want to know your capabilities to handle this sort of missile.''

The Navy's ship-borne Aegis system, deployed on cruisers and destroyers starting in the early 1980s, is designed to protect aircraft-carrier battle groups from missile attacks. But current and former officials say the Navy has no assurance Aegis, built by Lockheed Martin Corp., is capable of detecting, tracking and intercepting the Sizzler.

``This was an issue when I walked in the door in 2001,'' Thomas Christie, the Defense Department's top weapons-testing official from mid-2001 to early 2005, said in an interview.

`A Major Issue'

``The Navy recognized this was a major issue, and over the years, I had continued promises they were going to fully fund development and production'' of missiles that could replicate the Sizzler to help develop a defense against it, Christie said. ``They haven't.''

The effect is that in a conflict, the U.S. ``would send a billion-dollar platform loaded with equipment and crew into harm's way without some sort of confidence that we could defeat what is apparently a threat very near on the horizon,'' Christie said.

The Navy considered developing a program to test against the Sizzler ``but has no plans in the immediate future to initiate such a developmental effort,'' Naval Air Systems Command spokesman Rob Koon said in an e-mail.

Lieutenant Bashon Mann, a Navy spokesman, said the service is aware of the Sizzler's capabilities and is ``researching suitable alternatives'' to defend against it. ``U.S. naval warships have a layered defense capability that can defend against various missile threats,'' Mann said.

Raising Concerns

McQueary, head of the Pentagon's testing office, raised his concerns about the absence of Navy test plans for the missile in a Sept. 8, 2006, memo to Ken Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition. He also voiced concerns to Deputy Secretary England.

In the memo, McQuery said that unless the Sizzler threat was addressed, his office wouldn't approve test plans necessary for production to begin on several other projects, including Northrop Grumman Corp.'s new $35.8 billion CVN-21 aircraft-carrier project; the $36.5 billion DDG-1000 destroyer project being developed by Northrop and General Dynamics Corp.; and two Raytheon Corp. projects, the $6 billion Standard Missile-6 and $1.1 billion Ship Self Defense System.

Charts prepared by the Navy for a February 2005 briefing for defense contractors said the Sizzler, which is also called the SS-N-27B, starts out flying at subsonic speeds. Within 10 nautical miles of its target, a rocket-propelled warhead separates and accelerates to three times the speed of sound, flying no more than 10 meters (33 feet) above sea level.

Final Approach

On final approach, the missile ``has the potential to perform very high defensive maneuvers,'' including sharp-angled dodges, the Office of Naval Intelligence said in a manual on worldwide maritime threats.

The Sizzler is ``unique,'' the Defense Science Board, an independent agency within the Pentagon that provides assessments of major defense issues, said in an October 2005 report. Most anti-ship cruise missiles fly below the speed of sound and on a straight path, making them easier to track and target.

McQueary, in a March 16 e-mailed statement, said that ``to the best of our knowledge,'' the Navy hasn't started a test program or responded to the board's recommendations. ``The Navy may be reluctant to invest in development of a new target, given their other bills,'' he said.

`Aggressively Marketing'

The Sizzler's Russian maker, state-run Novator Design Bureau in Yekaterinburg, is ``aggressively marketing'' the weapon at international arms shows, said Steve Zaloga, a missile analyst with the Teal Group, a Fairfax, Virginia-based defense research organization. Among other venues, the missile was pitched at last month's IDEX 2007, the Middle East's largest weapons exposition, he said.

McVadon, who has written about the Chinese navy, called the Sizzler ``right now the most pertinent and pressing threat the U.S. faces in the case of a Taiwan conflict.'' Jane's, the London-based defense information group, reported in 2005 in its publication ``Missiles and Rockets'' that Russia had offered the missile to Iran as part of a sale in the 1990s of three Kilo- class submarines.

That report was confirmed by the Pentagon official who requested anonymity. The Office of Naval Intelligence suggested the same thing in a 2004 report, highlighting in its assessment of maritime threats Iran's possible acquisition of additional Russian diesel submarines ``with advanced anti-ship cruise missiles.''

The Defense Science Board, in its 2005 report, recommended that the Navy ``immediately implement'' a plan to produce a surrogate Sizzler that could be used for testing.

Past and present Congresspersons from across the political spectrum insist that if they had known then, what they know now, they would never have allowed President Bush to use the conditional authority they had provided him to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq.
Of course, they should have known their basic presumption

Originally posted by Bader Turkey looks to be moving towards obit with Russia and away from NATO.

They have moved forces across the Iraqi border.

Polish song says ; Do zakochania jeden krok- one step to love. Russia needs loyal soldiers and Russia for Turkey is only loyal partner. Turkey had sore experiments with UK and, USA and EU. They try to neglect this and disregard, this but true is only one. Russia and Turkey friendship is best choice.